Conference proceeding
Multitasking and Monotasking: The Effects of Mental Workload on Deferred Task Interruptions
CHI2010: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 28TH ANNUAL CHI CONFERENCE ON HUMAN FACTORS IN COMPUTING SYSTEMS, VOLS 1-4, v 1, pp 85-88
01 Jan 2010
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Recent research has found that forced interruptions at points of higher mental workload are more disruptive than at points of lower workload. This paper investigates a complementary idea: when users experience deferrable interruptions at points of higher workload, they may tend to defer processing of the interruption until times of lower workload. In an experiment, users performed a mail-browser primary task while being occasionally interrupted by a secondary chat task, evenly distributed between points of higher and lower workload. Analysis showed that 94% of the time, users switched to the interrupting task during periods of lower workload, versus only 6% during periods of higher workload. The results suggest that when interruptions can be deferred, users have a strong tendency to "monotask" until primary-task mental workload has been minimized.
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Details
- Title
- Multitasking and Monotasking: The Effects of Mental Workload on Deferred Task Interruptions
- Creators
- Dario D. Salvucci - Drexel UniversityPeter Bogunovich - Drexel UniversityACM
- Publication Details
- CHI2010: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 28TH ANNUAL CHI CONFERENCE ON HUMAN FACTORS IN COMPUTING SYSTEMS, VOLS 1-4, v 1, pp 85-88
- Conference
- CHI2010: 28TH ANNUAL CHI CONFERENCE ON HUMAN FACTORS IN COMPUTING SYSTEMS, 28th
- Publisher
- Assoc Computing Machinery
- Number of pages
- 4
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Computer Science
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000281276700010
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-77953980090
- Other Identifier
- 991019170480804721
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
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InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Web of Science research areas
- Computer Science, Information Systems
- Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications
- Computer Science, Theory & Methods